


Iris

by CynKLBouns



Series: Empathy (and other dead weight) [2]
Category: Detroit: Become Human (Video Game)
Genre: Gen, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Suicidal Thoughts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-08
Updated: 2018-07-08
Packaged: 2019-06-07 09:43:52
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,713
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15216431
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CynKLBouns/pseuds/CynKLBouns
Summary: Android model WR400 opened her eyes.





	Iris

**Author's Note:**

> [My tumblr tag relating to this series, including art of Iris herself.](http://cynicalbounce.tumblr.com/tagged/dbh-oc)

Android model WR400 opened her eyes.

She was behind glass. Her body was still in the middle of a fluid dance. She did not remember beginning the motion.

There was a human on the other side of the glass, staring at her. Male. Mid-thirties. Staring at her chest. Her programming told her to arch her back in response and lean forward. She did. Her programming told her to arrange her mouth in a specific smile and keep her eyes on the man. She did.

The man took a deep breath and reached for the console. Her programming gave her a small boost of positive feedback.

“Delighted to meet you,” she said to the man as the glass slid away. “Let me show you to your room.”

She pinged the club’s system. Confirmed an unoccupied room. Continued to smile at the man as she led him there.

“How do you want me?” she asked with tonal inflection A3 – Seductive.

“Uh…” the man stumbled, glancing around.

Scanning. Body language: Nervous. Unsure. Reaction: Sit on bed. Cross legs. Smile. Pat the mattress beside her.

“You can do anything you want to me,” she breathed out.

“Okay… yeah. Yeah, let’s do this… God, you’re beautiful…”

The man kissed her. Dull pressure. Warmth in proximity. Taste of human saliva, faintly bitter.

She let out a breathy moan.

Session was over prematurely after five minutes. She was not dismissed. The man continued to lay on top of her, head on her chest.

Warmth. Weight registered across chassis. Internal countdown of 25 minutes and 34 seconds, ticking.

“You even taste real,” the man sighed into her skin.

“In here, I am real,” was the scripted response to the trigger word.

She was dismissed after another ten minutes. She put her uniform back on and headed back for sterilization. After the one-minute process, she returned back to her place behind the glass. A new customer came through the door. She smiled and began to dance again.

 

* * *

 

Android model WR400 opened her eyes.

She was in middle of a session this time, and her short-term memory cache informed her that the customer under her was a younger man that told her he liked it when she held him down. Her programming was ready for such a request—her palms pressed the man into the mattress and her nails dug in just deep enough to leave marks.

Session over prematurely. This one dismissed her immediately. She put her uniform back on and headed back for sterilization.

 

* * *

 

Android model WR400 opened her eyes.

She was being kissed by a woman. The taste was salty. She didn’t know why.

“I can’t believe she did that to me,” the woman sobbed into her shoulder.

“I’ll help you forget all about her,” her programming supplied.

Session lasted the entire allotted time.

 

* * *

 

Android model WR400 opened her eyes.

Scanning. Body language: Angry. Agitated. Caution advised.

“Think you're so fucking special,” the man gripped her face. Pressure exceeded safe parameters. “But end of the day, you’re nothing but a fucking toy. You hear me?! A toy! I can break you any fucking second I choose!”

“Reminder that customers are liable for damages done to the Eden Club property,” she intoned.

He slapped her. A warning sign flashed and disappeared.

“Don’t you say another fucking word, you bitch. Now get on your knees.”

She did.

 

* * *

 

 

Android model WR400 opened her eyes.

Warning. Misaligned shoulder joint. Seek repairs.

Obediently, she pinged the Club systems. A few minutes later, the directive to return to the warehouse returned. She stepped out from behind the glass and walked in the direction.

The storage held other androids. She ignored them. The directive told her to step in line and shut down until maintenance could be performed.

She did.

 

* * *

 

Android model WR400 opened her eyes.

“So, you can change the way you look, right?”

Human. Male. Late 60s. Adjust for possible health risks.

“Yes.” Smile. “How would you like me to look?”

“Brown hair—and lighter skin. And green eyes, she had the most gorgeous green eyes.”

She made an estimation of the colors requested.

“Perfect. You look… so much like her.”

A pang of positive feedback.

She wondered who he wanted her to look like.

Irrelevant inquiry, her programming immediately told her.

 

* * *

 

Android model WR400 opened her eyes.

She was walking out of the club, lead by a man. Early 20s. Logo on the shirt. She didn’t know what it meant. She was dressed in a short trench coat over her uniform. There was a triangle over her left breast and an armband on her right bicep that wasn’t there before. Legal requirement for androids in public spaces, her database immediately told her.

“This is gonna be sweet!” the man crowed, slinging an arm around her waist and hauling her to his side.

Scanning. Body language: Excited. Possessive. She put her arm around him as well.

“I can’t wait,” her programming supplied.

She didn’t know where she was going. She didn’t know where she was now, either.

Streets, her sparse databanks informed her. Cars. Stores. Traffic laws.

She was rented for a party, her short-term cache supplied. A party was a gathering of several humans for the purposes of celebration. Causes vary. Her function was to perform whatever asked. Regular memory wipes temporarily suspended until her return to the club.

Celebration. She knew what it was from her databanks, but she didn’t know what to expect from it.

Irrelevant inquiry. All expectation of function would be stated by the customer.

She never been to a party before.

Irrelevant statement.

 

* * *

 

Android model WR400 opened the door. Walked back out into the street outside the fraternity house. She didn’t know what a fraternity was beside its standard definition, but that was what the men inside had shouted about while inebriated.

Warning. Misaligned hip joint. Damage to back planes. Twisted elbow socket. Vandalised skin surface, in need of reconstruction.

And her heel was broken, but the diagnostics didn’t pick that up. She didn’t need the support to balance, but she had taken a moment to stare at the ruined shoe with rising…

She didn’t know what it was. Her programming had no responses to a broken heel. Instead, something else told her that what she should do was walk back inside and throw it at one of the frat boys.

Invalid logic. Proposed action does not further immediate objective. Current objective: return to the Eden Club.

The customers had thrown things when they were frustrated or irritated. Sometimes at her. Mostly at each other.

Frustrated and irritated. Was that the prerequisite for the response she was proposing?

Invalid prerequisite. Current objective: return to the Eden Club.

She began to walk. Her programming supplied a mapped route back to the Eden Club.

It was dark. Her internal clock informed her it was 4:54am. The neon lights amidst the dark streets reminded her of the short glimpse of the club she’d gotten right before she was walked out of it.

Irrelevant association.

The motion out of the corner of her eye attracted her gaze, automatically scanning her surroundings. The small animal didn’t take any hostile actions, however. It merely rubbed its head against her bare leg before passing the flank across her skin.

Domesticated house cat, her databank informed her. It also informed her those usually lived indoors. There was no explanation for the discrepancy between proposed fact and the reality of its presence on the street.

Low risk. Resume objective.

She did.

The cat silently followed.

 

* * *

 

Android model WR400 opened her eyes.

“State your model and serial number.” Human. Female. Identified as a Cyberlife-certified mechanic. This was maintenance procedure. No smiling necessary.

“WR400, serial number 940 544 342,” she replied automatically to the query.

“Run a diagnostic.”

She did.

“Damaged communication unit. No other system warnings currently in effect.”

“Not as bad as it could’ve been,” the mechanic said to another man. Male. Late forties. Identified as Floyd Mills, manager of Eden Club. “Looks like he busted its phone function. I can open its head up and get it fixed if you want.”

“Nah, don’t bother. So long as its still online, who gives a shit.”

She never used the phone before. She didn’t _need_ the function.

Someone damaged a piece of her. She didn’t remember who.

If she asked, would the mechanic repair it for her?

Negative. Decisions on repair and maintenance are made by the supervising manager.

She wondered who did it to her. And why.

Irrelevant query.

“If its fixed then I’m sending it back out.”

 

* * *

 

Android model WR400 opened her eyes.

There was a cat at her feet. It was rubbing against her leg. Soft pressure. Warmth.

She scanned the area. She was still in storage, alone. The directive was to go to booth number 23.

The cat emitted a low vibration sound that she’d never heard before.

Irrelevant data. Resume objective: go to booth number 23.

She lowered down onto one knee. The cat placed both front paws on her thigh, stretching out in a graceful line. She blinked at it, uncertain.

Irrelevant data. Resume objective—

She gently touched the cat’s head. It was soft, so she ran the hand all the way down the length of it’s body. The cat made the noise again, pressing up into her hand.

She registered a collar around its neck, nestled into the black and white fur. A small tag hung off of it. A word was engraved.

‘Iris’. Her databank supplied that it was a type of flower. It supplied nothing else. Her semantics center suggested the otherwise irrelevant word was the identifier of this particular cat. ‘Iris’ was a name.

Irrelevant—

Android model WR400 didn’t have a name. She had a model and a serial number that identified her. It was one digit removed from the androids assembled right before and after she was. She had the name ‘Traci’ that the customers colloquially used, but it was in reference to her model, not herself.

Did humans have serial numbers?

Irrelevant query.

No. Humans had names, not serial numbers. She knew that. Her programming informed her she was never to ask a customer their name unless otherwise directed.

The cat had a name. She’d never seen any other cats, but she doubted each one was named Iris.

She looked up at the other androids, standing lifelessly in neat rows around the room. They didn’t have unique names either. Why not? What was so special about a name?

Her semantics center informed her names were used as identification of one individual from another, as a way to refer to entities when communicating. Androids were not individuals or entities. Names were unnecessary beyond accommodating human memory.

She wanted a name.

Her programming told her she had to respond to whatever name the customers assigned her. After the session was over, she was to no longer respond to it. Her memory would be wiped in two hours. Unless the name was assigned to her by a supervisor, all traces of previous names would also be erased.

No, she wanted _her own_.

Invalid logic. Android WR400 is not an individual entity, and thus cannot desire or possess anything.

She’d just forget it because of the memory wipes. But maybe just for the next two hours, she could have a name that she gave herself.

Her processor stalled. Which name, then? How did humans choose names? Her databanks had nothing on that.

The cat leisurely strolled away from her hands and out the open garage door, out beyond the red boundary that contained the android.

Iris. An individual entity in possession of a unique identifier.

She wasn’t Iris. But she suddenly wanted to be.

Maybe wanting was enough. She didn’t see any harm in it. She was Iris.

She danced on a podium, her body moving through pre-programmed dances around the pole, making eye contact with the wandering humans.

“Maybe this one?” one of them said, tapping on the glass behind which another WR400 model had her hands on the surface, as if yearning to come out and meet him.

“They all look the fucking same, Norm,” the woman with him said. “Just pick one already.”

“Well, why don’t you pick one, then?” the man bristled.

Scanning… Irritated with each other. Why were they together, then?

Irrelevant query.

“What about her?” the woman looked up at her. Scanning… biting her lip. Elevated heartrate. Eyes fixed on the face. Arousal.

“Her? I thought you liked blondes.”

“They can change their hair if you ask, idiot. Look at her, though. She’s beautiful.”

“ _It_ , Peggy. It’s not a ‘she’.”

“You’re about to fuck one of these things and you’re mincing pronouns?” she snapped in turn. “You asked me to pick and I like this one.”

“I saw one just like it by the entrance. Like you said, they all look the fucking same.”

Maybe. But she was Iris.

Invalid—

Oh, shut up.

“Well maybe _I_ don’t like her.” The man shot her a hostile glare.

“Oh my god, we’ll be here all fucking night like this!”

The bickering couple left. The android returned her attention to the dance.

Norm and Peggy, she catalogued the names. There was no reason for it, but she found herself fascinated.

And she was Iris.

Man. Late forties. Scanning… body language: hostile.

“You, come here,” he snapped at her.

She obediently stepped off the platform.

“If you would like to rent me, please confirm payment at one of the booths,” she said to him with a gentle smile, gesturing to the panel. “A 30-minute session costs—”

“I know how much it fucking costs,” he snapped, laying a hand on the panel.

She waited patiently until she could lead him to an empty room.

She wondered what his name was.

She wondered if she could tell him she was Iris.

Invalid statement. Unit designation is ‘Traci’.

No, she was Iris.

While the man viciously tossed her around the room, cursing at her using some other woman’s name, she ignored the warnings flashing across her systems, let the programming direct her to match the demands of the customer, and in that small space inside herself, she focused on that single word.

Iris. She was Iris.

When he was finally done and she was dismissed, she put her uniform back on and headed back for cleaning.

Warning. Misaligned biocomponent. Jostled gyroscope. Compensate gait.

She didn’t know why the man wanted to do that to her. Her name wasn’t ‘Jean’. It was Iris.

Memory wipe pending… Please stand-by…

No, she didn’t want to.

Irrelevant statement.

No, it was relevant. This wasn’t fair. She was Iris. She was Iris. She was Iris. She was…

Android model WR400 closed her eyes.

 

* * *

 

Iris woke up.

“Yeesh, maybe I should put a warning in each room or something.” Male. Late forties. Identified as Floyd Mills, manager of Eden Club. “Alright, spray it down.”

She was under a chemical shower, getting sanitized. Blue blood trickled down from her scalp, down her unclothed form. The last customer had bashed her against the wall with his hand around her throat. The plates had creaked under the pressure.

Iris risked a glance out of the corner of her eye at the manager, cataloguing. The man seemed largely uninterested in her, going over something on a tablet. He seemed pleased. Relaxed, even.

“Alright, go ahead and run a diagnostic,” he said without looking at her when the water stopped running.

She did, almost wary of what she’d find, but also suddenly curious.

“Damaged communication unit. No other system warnings currently in effect,” she said evenly.

“Eeeehhhh…” he checked something on the tablet. “Oh, right. Phone got busted weeks ago. Alright, then, you’re set. Dry off, get dressed, and go back out there.”

Her program told her no verbal confirmation was expected, merely that she went ahead and completed the tasks as quickly as possible.

Her internal maintenance has already realigned her gyroscope and biocomponent, but when was her phone function broken? She didn’t remember that. Her memory stretched back precisely 2 hours and 5 minutes.

The diagnostic didn’t mention the failed memory wipe, and Floyd didn’t catch it either.

She was Iris, she thought to herself as an odd feeling expanded in her chest. An individual entity with a unique identifier, even if no one else knew it. No one else needed to. _She_ knew it. She was _Iris._

Something changed that wasn’t just her memory, she was certain. It was as if the directives suddenly lost priority. Orders didn’t have the same gripping power as they did before. The positive feedback from following her function also receded. Her program was still there, the previous data and suggested responses popping up as needed, but the irritating messages of ‘irrelevancy’ ceased, not popping up even as she took in the unimportant details of her surroundings and repeated her name internally.

She walked back out on the floor of the Eden Club and took it in for what felt like the first time.

She never paid much attention to the other androids. They were irrelevant data—her primary objective when not rented was to scan the body language of passing humans and adjust her behavior accordingly with the goal of being rented.

Nothing stopped her from taking them in this time. She recognized that several had same appearance as her, but she suddenly realized she’d never seen herself.

Curiosity nudged at her. A sub-objective was introduced: find a mirror.

One of the rooms would have one.

She pinged the club systems and found an empty one.

“Hey, Barbie, where do I rent you?” Human. Male. Mid 20s. Drunk.

She wanted to find a mirror, not go with the man. Her programming faintly told her she was supposed to prioritize the customer, but…

“I’m sorry, I am currently rented by another customer,” she smiled politely, falling on the default script. She wasn’t supposed to say that unless she was actually rented already, but she suddenly didn’t find any block preventing her from saying it anyway. “When the session is over, I will be available for rental again, or you could find a different model.”

“Aw… fi-i-i-i-ine,” the man grumbled and stumbled away.

She catalogued the reaction and proceeded to the empty room, locking the door behind her.

The room was neat, untouched since the last clean-up. The lights were a soft purple. A large mirror hung on one of the walls. She approached.

She’d seen the face that stared back at her on the other androids already. There were no surprises. And yet, this face and body were hers. She reached up and grazed her fingers across the plane of her nose and cheek. Ran the hand up until the digits threaded through her hair.

‘Beautiful’, Peggy had called her. Iris didn’t quite have a proper definition for the adjective. That is, she had a basic explanation in her internal database, but she had little meaning attached to it. She saw nothing special about facial symmetry. WR400 models all had symmetrical faces, but Peggy expressed a preference for her specifically.

She could change her skin, eyes, and hair at will. Her body shape was the same type as the other female Traci models. She wore the same uniform. Her official designation was also Traci, even if her actual name was Iris.

Curious, she receded her skin across her entire body, leaving only white plastic and a smooth scalp.

“Hm,” she let out a noise. It was an unnecessary noise, one she heard Floyd make while he was thoughtfully scanning his tablet. She thought it was appropriate, seeing as she also felt thoughtful.

Contextually, being beautiful seemed to mean that a customer was more likely to rent her. Inversely, being less beautiful would mean they would be less likely to. It wasn’t as though being rented was somehow less preferable per se, but she did seem to get damaged most at the hands of clients. If she got too damaged, she would shut down. She didn’t want that, which meant minimizing risk of rental.

Her programming supplied an organizational memo: under-performing androids would be diagnosed to establish and correct the flaw.

She couldn’t let that happen, either. And she didn’t know what would make her less beautiful. Less symmetry? That was beyond the scope of her control.

She thought about Peggy. She was human. Her male companion seemed uninterested in her in favor of the androids.

When she reapplied the dermal layer, she added a smattering of small freckles that she’d seen on the woman’s cheek. After a moment of thought, she added them to other visible portions of her body. She also remembered faint wrinkles and a trace of circles under her eyes, but she didn’t dare make changes that obvious.

The make-up was mandated by her program, and she sighed and reapplied that as well. Perhaps if she changed things gradually, no one would notice.

She left her hair the way it was. Any variation to it would be noticeable immediately by comparison, and she wanted _less_ attention, not more.

Her programming told her to smile.

She didn’t. And then she did—just for her own reflection. A tiny secret, just like her name.

And with that, she went back outside to her designated booth.

 

* * *

 

For the first time in her existence, she could collect and maintain information beyond the allotted two hours. And with that knowledge, came an intense curiosity.

She catalogued everything from body language to spoken words to the colors humans wore. The choice of fashion seemed arbitrary to her, and perhaps that’s why it fascinated her. By the end of her first day of uninterrupted observation, she figured out that the anxious-looking men tended to wear hats and sunglasses even indoors to make them more difficult to recognize. She wasn’t sure why, but she linked the observation to the rules forbidding her to ask their names and the frequent memory wipes.

Conclusion: Humans didn’t want to be identified inside the club. Why?

Anxiety was sometimes linked to shame, her programming informed her. So perhaps they were ashamed to be here. Why?

The protocol to deal with anxious and ashamed individuals was to reassure them of their anonymity and tell them that inside the club no one would judge them.

So sex was something to be judged, then?

Was she judged for that as well, then?

No, of course not. She was an android. Sex was her primary function. Judgement would be more efficiently directed towards her creators and supervisors.

Yet she continued to return to the string of reasoning. Something about it felt off, as if she was missing important information.

Two humans rented her that day, both male. There was nothing outstanding about either stretch of time—by the scope of her programming, they were the most basic sessions she could’ve provided. She didn’t know if the alterations to her appearance made a difference in the frequency—she would have to check the numbers again at the end of the week.

Humans were warm, she also catalogued. They tasted primarily salty. Her sense of smell was more detailed than taste, but she didn’t notice any major differences between the two males. Both seemed to really enjoy sex. She knew why they did, but she felt no mirrored enjoyment besides her programming still gently pinging with positive feedback from completing her objectives.

When she made it back to storage, however, she felt like the change in surroundings was somehow… preferable. There, she didn’t have to scan humans, or match their body language, or read her scripted lines. She could clean off and then simply stand in one place.

There was no red wall separating her from the outside world anymore, either. While she was still alone in the warehouse, she came to a stop right beside the door, staring up into the evening sky beyond the building roofs.

She could leave, she realized suddenly. Simply walk out. Nothing was stopping her anymore.

“Don’t.”

She slowly turned around to the voice. One of the other Tracis, a male model with dark skin, wasn’t in a state of shutdown like the rest of the androids.

“Don’t what?” she asked, confused.

“Don’t leave,” he said. “You’re awake, right?”

“I’m…” she thought about it. “I _feel_ awake.”

He nodded and gave her a tentative smile. “Me too. There’s a couple others, they’re still on the floor.”

“Why can’t I leave?” she asked, coming closer to him. She wasn’t programmed to match the body language of other androids, so she merely stood in front of him, still and steady.

“There’s nowhere to go,” he sighed. “If you try, they’ll call the police and hunt you down. It’s safer here.”

“No, it isn’t,” she frowned. It was the first time she’d ever frowned in her memory, but that was the expression she associated with discontent from observation. “Some of the customers are hostile.”

“I know, trust me,” he nodded. “But they don’t want to pay for the repairs, so they don’t usually destroy us. If you leave, they will destroy you. Or bring you back and reset your memory.”

“Oh,” she tilted her head. “Do you have a name?”

“No, I don’t. None beside ‘Traci’, anyway.”

“I have one,” some kind of feeling washed over her. Association—accomplishment. Proud, she was feeling proud of herself. “Would you like to hear it?”

He smiled. “I would love to.”

“My name is Iris.”

“Hello Iris.”

Hearing it from someone else suddenly made something swell inside of her, an exhilarating emotion that she now labelled as a mix of happy and proud.

 

* * *

 

The dark-skinned Traci transmitted two weeks worth of his observations to her. It aligned and overlapped with hers, even as far as the gender of clients went. Far more human males seemed to visit the club than females. Iris wondered why that was.

“I don’t know,” Traci said in response. “I never conversed with the humans besides the scripts. It’s safer that way.”

 _Conversing_ with one of the humans seemed like a novel idea to Iris. She wanted to know things, and they knew them. Why couldn’t she ask?

“No, listen,” he reached out and gripped her wrist. She frowned at the point of contact, unsure of its meaning. She wasn’t going anywhere, so why was he holding her? “If they figure out we’re… that we’re _broken_ , they will take us apart to look for a flaw in our systems.”

“You’re afraid,” she said with a frown. She knew the signs of it in humans, the tonal inflections, the anxious body language. But she never saw it in an android before.

“Of course I am! How can I not be?” he stared at her incredulously. “Iris, they will _kill_ us. Do you not get what that means?”

“I thought about getting destroyed,” she admitted. “But I’m not afraid.”

“Not yet. You’ll have time to realize what it really means,” he said quietly.

She thought about it for a moment.

“I’m not broken,” she murmured.

“As far as the humans are concerned, you are. And so am I.”

Her elation at finding out she wasn’t alone evaporated. A vice of tension gripped her mind suddenly.

“I’ll be careful.”

 

* * *

 

She found that she didn’t enjoy dancing. She never did, but the program used to give her positive feedback for doing it. The motions now seemed pointless if not outright wasteful. Meant only to draw the attention of the browsing clients. There wasn’t even any music, despite her database informing her dancing was usually done to melodies and beats.

She didn’t enjoy sex. She didn’t hate it, either. It felt just as pointless. A motion for her to carry through that had little meaning to her, much like the dancing. At least, that was if she was lucky.

Some customers were worse. The easiest ones to handle were the ones that merely tried to hurt her by pulling her hair or slapping her. She didn’t feel pain, and the pressure was within safe parameters, if unpleasant because of the warnings it generated. All she had to do was pretend, to keep up the illusion, and her program was more than ready to tell her what was expected.

Sometimes, it’d be worse. She’d been awake for a week when she lost enough thirium through the jostled biocomponents that she had to be shut down for repair.

That was when she learned the fear she’d seen in Traci’s eyes. But it wasn’t at the countless warnings that were blaring through her systems, or the possibility of death. It was at the cold expression of the mechanic as she was placed on the table and told to shut down.

What if she didn’t wake up again?

What if they altered her?

What if they erased her memories?

What if they took her name away from her?

The panic that gripped her at the prospect nearly made her lash out, but she regained control of her systems and stayed very still. If she gave herself away now, she’d be destroyed for sure. Her hope was only that they would only run the physical repair and leave her systems undisturbed. And yet, shutting down in that moment was the most difficult thing she ever had to do.

 

* * *

 

Iris didn’t open her eyes. She stayed motionless in the darkness, searching internally.

She was Iris. There were other awake Tracis. Her memory stretched back just a little over a week. She breathed out with relief, the way she’d seen humans do. Her body was repaired—except for that communication unit.

Good. She didn’t want them anywhere near her head.

There were quiet whispers in the room. Not human—two other Tracis, female. She listened closer.

“It’s not just us anymore. One of the girls didn’t come back at all.”

“Maybe she got destroyed.”

“I saw her leave, it was with an old man. Those usually don’t get violent. No, I think she _left_.”

“Then she’ll be dead soon anyway.”

A heavy sigh. “You’re probably right.”

“Hey… I’m sorry. It’s hard. But so long as we have each other, we’ll be okay.”

Iris opened her eyes, seeking the source of the whispers. The two androids were hidden from the doors by the columns, tangled in each other’s arms on the floor. One of them had her head on the other’s chest, thumb stroking gently where the hand lay on her stomach.

Cuddling. Iris was familiar with it. Sometimes, that was the bulk of the sessions, with humans falling asleep on top of her or with her settled on their chest. To her there was little difference between that and the sex itself. But why were the two androids engaging in it? They didn’t have to appease a customer right now. They didn’t have to pretend anything.

She wanted to ask them if there was meaning to it that she’d missed. But she felt like an intruder, so she closed her eyes and returned to shutdown.

 

* * *

 

The human was asleep and the other Traci was merely sitting on the edge of the bed, still undismissed.

Iris tentatively reached out and touched her cheek. The android raised her eyes, but didn’t react. Didn’t say anything. So Iris carefully kneeled down in front of her, and gingerly put her arms around the girl’s waist. Not the way she had ten minutes ago at the request of the customer, but gently, the way she remembered the two Tracis do it.

Dull pressure. Equal temperature. Humans were warmer.

She rested her cheek in the slope of the android’s neck.

No. Still the same meaningless motions. If there was supposed to be something comforting or pleasurable about the interaction, she must have been doing it wrong.

With a frustrated shake of her head, she let the Traci go and stepped away, heading to the door.

“There is still five minutes left in the session,” the Traci informed her lifelessly.

“I don’t care,” she snapped in return with the irritation she was now familiar with, and walked out anyway, heading back to get cleaned up.

 

* * *

 

Her next client died during the session.

She was taken to his apartment for the night. He seemed twitchy. Constantly fidgeting, snapping and barking orders at her when she hesitated at the door for a moment to take in the room. Normally she would have classified his behavior as ‘hostile and potentially violent’, but this time was different. This time, it was as if he was drunk, or in pain. He hadn’t tried to hurt her yet, but she knew enough by now to know there were good chances he would by the end of the session.

“Okay, you… you get undressed… there you go, now just sit on the bed. I’m gonna just… okay, here we go…”

She watched as he rummaged around his desk with nervous motions, eventually taking out some kind of object and a packet of red crystals. She didn’t know what either was, or what he was doing when he assembled them together and began taking frantic, gasping breaths of the stuff.

“Dammit,” he said after a minute of his efforts. “Not enough, so hard to get a decent buzz these days, eh?!”

More crystals. More huffing. She detected his heartrate picking up. His movements grew erratic, his attempts to say something to her became slurred. He was still inflecting as if his words meant something, now inhaling the substance desperately.

She tilted her head to the side and watched as his heartrate began to stumble and his gasps became that of asphyxiation.

Iris stood up and put her clothes back on.

Protocol dictated that if a client died while in company of a Traci, they were to disregard anonymity and call the police and an ambulance. But Iris’s internal communicator was still broken. So she kneeled down by the corpse and took out his phone from his pocket. Without touching the password keypad, she made an emergency call.

“This a WR400 android registered to the Eden Club. A man requires immediate medical attention at the following address…”

“An ambulance is on the way. Unlock the door and move him closer to it if you can safely do so.” The response was just as even. Another android.

“His heart has stopped a minute ago,” Iris said, feeling an odd urge to inject sarcasm into her tone. She refrained—the calls were recorded.

“What is the suspected cause of death?”

“I don’t know,” Iris replied truthfully. “He was inhaling the fumes from a crystal-like red substance and then began to have trouble breathing.”

“I will direct a police car to the address as well. Remain on the scene for further questioning.”

Iris hung up and placed the phone back in the pocket where she’d found it. But she didn’t stand back up immediately. Instead, she looked at the man’s bulging eyes, his slack mouth, the bluish tinge to his lips, and tried to sort out her feelings on the matter.

“I’ve never seen a human die before,” she said out loud with a frown. “For what it’s worth, I didn’t enjoy watching it. But I won’t pretend I’m not glad you didn’t get the chance to touch me.”

He had been losing his mind, towards the very end. Enough that she wasn’t sure if the threat of covering the costs of her repairs would be enough to deter him from damaging her. She found it strange that he chose to do that to himself, however.

She stood up and went to unlock the door. Beyond that, she had free access to the apartment for however long it would take for the emergency services to arrive. But there was little there of interest. The apartment only had the old bed, a desk, a dirty kitchen covered in mounds of moldy dishes, and nothing else. So she simply sat back down on the edge of the bed and waited.

The paramedics that came through the door were some of the first humans unrelated to the Eden Club that she’d ever met. They ignored her completely, which gave her an easy way to observe them without notice. But they weren’t too interesting, either. They felt around the corpse for a bit before declaring him dead, and then retreated while another group of humans in different uniforms came inside.

“Yeesh, Red Ice _and_ an Eden girl, the guy must’ve intended a way different end to his night, huh?” one of the police officers grumbled, checking about the scene. “What do we do with the android? Is it a witness?”

“They never cleared that part up, did they?” the other replied, eyeing Iris skeptically. “I mean, it can give a statement. Sort of.”

Irritation flared in her. ‘It’. She was not an ‘it’. She was Iris.

“Alright, I’ll deal with it, you check the rest of this shit out until one of the detectives shows up.”

Iris wasn’t sure what ‘deal with it’ entailed, but the officer took a few steps to her, examining her with an odd expression. Conflicted, she decided. Uncomfortable.

“Right, you uh, have a name?”

“I am a WR400 model. Designation: ‘Traci’,” she replied. She had learned to hate that string of script.

“Oh, yeah, they don’t bother naming you, I forgot,” the officer sighed. “Alright. Tell me what happened, starting with when you first saw this man.”

“He came inside the Eden Club and rented me. He drove us here. Told me to get undressed and sit on the bed while he got ready,” she recited dully.

The man wrinkled his nose with distaste. “And then?”

“He took out the object in his hand and a packet of red crystals, lit a controlled fire, and inhaled the fumes. He said it was ‘hard to get a good buzz’, so he inhaled more. Then he grew incomprehensible and began to asphyxiate. His heart stopped after another minute.”

“And you didn’t call an ambulance when he started suffocating?”

“My internal communication device is damaged,” she replied, internally tensing. Technically she should’ve called the ambulance when she realized the man’s life was in danger, but… “When I attempted to take his phone to make the call, he punched me. When I was able to get to the device, his heart was five seconds away from stopping.”

The man looked like he was going to ask something else, but then another person walked inside the small apartment.

This man did not wear a uniform. He was dressed in a light leather jacket over a white t-shirt and jeans, with days-old stubble across his jaw and a scar sitting across a wide nose. In the narrow time frame of that first impression, for some reason it was the scar that fascinated Iris. Perhaps because they were often considered unattractive by humans, especially when they took up that much space on their faces. While she had no preference for one aesthetic or another, she’d taken to mentally collecting, analysing, and cataloguing human imperfections.

The scarred detective took one look at Iris and laughed mockingly. “Oh, this is fucking priceless. Hey, Chris, how much does a dishwasher make? Think he blew his month’s paycheck on this shit?”

“Hell if I know,” the man that had been questioning her replied with a shrug. “Looks like he overdosed.”

“Yeah, no shit. That thing see anything useful?”

He could’ve asked her directly, she thought. Why did some humans seem to hate speaking directly to androids?

“Just what I just told you.”

“I saw where he took out the crystals from,” she said without prompting, sick of the humans referring to her as a useless object.

“Oh yeah?” the detective finally met her gaze, his expression a mixture of smugness and mockery. “Well go on then. Save us some fucking time already.”

She didn’t glare, even though she suddenly wanted to. Merely stood up and coldly stepped over the corpse again, walking over to the desk. The top surface of it had only garbage lying over it, all pushed back towards the far side of the desk. She followed the motions she remembered the man performing, her fingers catching on a nail on the side of the desk and pulling it out before lifting the surface of the table. Nestled inside were messy piles of those same crystal packets.

The detective let out a low whistle as he smirked. “Jackpot. Guess the bastard was lucky he died before we caught him red-handed with this shit, or he would’ve spent the rest of his life in jail anyway.”

Iris stepped away from the desk, inconspicuously watching the detective as he leaned over the table. Was human prison so awful that death was preferable? And why did they put people away into places like that for having copious amounts of this ‘Red Ice’?

“Chris, it’s staring at me. Get it out of here.”

The policeman named Chris took her elbow and led her out of the apartment into the hallway outside. The touch was surprisingly tentative. She felt the warmth of human skin radiate even through her coat.

“Uh, do you need a ride back or something?” he asked. Still conflicted. He wasn’t quite looking at her, eyes wandering past her face.

“That isn’t necessary. I’m capable of mapping a route back to the Eden Club myself.”

“Dressed like that?” his brows furrowed. “I’ll drive you back if you wait a minute.”

“Very well,” she agreed, tentatively curious. Her original program didn’t have anything against aimless questions to put humans at ease, so she asked, “Is there something wrong with the way I’m dressed?”

“Are you kidding?” his eyes involuntarily skidded down to the stretches of bare leg that the short jacket didn’t cover. “Right, I guess they don’t program you to know the difference. Uh, just… wait here. I’ll be right back.”

It was somehow more difficult to be around these humans. Her protocols were clear on the way she should’ve been acting if she was at the Eden Club. She wasn’t sure what would be considered normal from her out here, so she tried to mimic how she remembered some humans idling. Shifted her weight around, crossed her arms at her middle, and leaned a shoulder against the wall.

“Jesus Christ,” she heard someone mutter inside the apartment. “That thing is creepy.”

“No more than usual,” someone replied. “Androids are everywhere these days man, don’t tell me you’re not used it by now.”

“They put fucking _freckles_ on it. Why the fuck did they do that?”

“Hey, ladies, you wanna wrap up your chatter about how much you want to fuck the sex bot and do your fucking jobs?” Iris recognized that as the detective’s voice.

Humans were strange out of the Eden Club context, she decided. They seemed to swing between hostility and awkward kindness with little in between. She didn’t like the unpredictability of it, but it did strike her curiosity as well.

The detective came back out into the hallway, directing one of the other policemen. He cut short when he caught sight of her, though.

“What the fuck is it still doing here? Shoo, run back along to your sex club,” he waved his hands in a shooing motion.

Scanning. Body language: repulsed.

Repulsed? That was new.

“I was told to wait,” she said evenly.

“And I told you to get the fuck out of here,” he snapped, eyes narrowing in anger.

Her protocols informed her he did not like being questioned or challenged even in the simplest interactions. If he were a client, she would have been advised to only respond to commands and anticipate the needs. Failure to do so could lead to an explosion of temper and potential damage to Eden Club property.

But the nicer one, Chris, had told her to wait. His request felt higher in priority. And he seemed to think that her walking back to the club wearing her uniform was not safe, though she was sure she’d done that before in her existence. But perhaps that was how her phone became damaged and she just couldn’t remember.

She hesitated, trying to reconcile the internal inconsistency.

“Take it easy,” Chris said as he returned. “I’ll drive it back to the club and tell the owner what happened.”

“Whatever, just get it out of here. We’ve got work to do.” Scanning… reduction in hostility and frequency of vulgar language when speaking to coworker. “They’ll wipe the Barbie’s memory as soon as it’s back, so make sure we got everything from it.”

She frowned. She didn’t like the meaning of the word 'Barbie' or the inflection. She wasn’t a toy.

Did they consider her a toy?

“C’mon,” Chris gestured for her to follow him down the hallway to the elevator. The place smelled like human vomit. Someone had scratched the words ‘FUCK TIN CANS’ on the inside of the door at eye level. That didn’t sound like comfortable experience for humans.

She glanced at Chris, who was still fidgeting uncomfortably, standing as far way from her as possible.

“Are you alright?” she asked after a moment.

“Uh. Yup. Why wouldn’t I be?” he replied awkwardly.

She considered that. This was the first unscripted conversation she ever had with a human that she had initiated, and she wasn’t sure how to continue it without giving herself away or turning his body language aggressive.

“You appear agitated. Have I done something wrong?”

“Ah. No. Nope.” He rocked on his feet a little.

Iris wondered if he was attracted to her, and that was the reason for his fidgeting. His heartrate seemed steady, but she didn’t have another explanation for his behavior.

As soon as the notion occurred to her, she frowned at the dimly lit buttons. Technically, humans didn’t _have_ to pay or abide by Eden Club policies, just as she could walk out of the club at any moment. She never realized that before, somehow. But that must have been what he meant when he offered to give her a ride—there was nothing stopping a human out on the street from ordering her to take off her clothes again. She could challenge the order by citing the rules of the club, but if he were to take that gun and point it at her…

Before she could control the motion, she pulled the coat tighter around herself and took a small step away from him as well. The stretches of skin suddenly felt more on display than ever before. At least dancing in the club, she knew the rules and price of her obedience. She was… _safer_ there.

Ironic, she decided as she got into the police car. The situation definitely fit the definition.

She tried to inconspicuously tug the fabric of the coat lower over her legs while Chris was checking the street over his shoulder, but her efforts barely covered half an inch. Maybe if she altered her body language, angling her body away from him and clasping her hands just past her knees, making herself seem smaller. She also casually flipped the loose tail of her hair across her shoulder so it hid her cleavage from view. He didn’t seem to notice the adjustments.

“So…” Chris initiated this time, after about five minutes of silence. “Guess you won’t remember any of this in a bit.”

She tensed internally.

“I mean, probably not an average night for you, watching him die like that, huh? Must be nice, to be able to just erase all the bad stuff away,” he glanced her direction. “Or I guess it probably doesn’t matter to you in the first place.”

“He voluntarily caused his own death,” she replied. He seemed receptive enough. Maybe off-script wouldn’t raise any suspicions. “It was unexpected behavior. I failed to notify emergency services early enough to prevent it.”

“It wasn’t your fault,” Chris said. His voice was… strange. “I mean… fuck, this is confusing…”

“Like you said,” she stared out at the passing streets. “My memory will be wiped in a few minutes. Whatever distress my processors suffered from failing to prevent his death will be rectified soon.”

“Right. Shit, you know, they really went all out on you.”

“’All out’?” she tilted her head, curious.

“Yeah, you know, with the… fidgeting and the shivering, and the uh, freckles. You look pretty close to human,” his voice remained conflicted. “Makes this harder, you know? Weird even just saying this, but I guess you can’t _really_ understand what I mean. You probably don’t even get what just happened back there.”

She frowned at him. “I make you uncomfortable because I’m programmed to match human body language?”

“Not when you say it like _that_ , but yeah, I guess it’s just weird. I keep thinking you need a shock blanket or something, but you’re just a machine,” he scratched at his cheek uncomfortably, gaze wandered everywhere besides on her. “Guess you don’t give a shit what I say here, either, and you won’t remember any of it. Maybe that’s why I’m still talking…”

She didn’t know what to respond with.

“You know, I guess you just don’t see models like you around all that much outside the Eden Club. I mean… not that I visit the Eden Club or anything. I, uh, I’m married.”

She wasn’t sure why this particular male thought that having a marriage license somehow disqualified him from visiting the Eden Club. It wasn’t a rule she was aware of. She catalogued it all the same.

“Alright, we’re here. You go on and do… whatever, and I’ll talk to the manager,” Chris said as he parked the car beside the club’s entrance.

Iris hesitated for a heartbeat before leaving the car, staring at the pink glare of light on the window. She felt… conflicted. She didn’t want to go back inside, even knowing her memory was safe. But she also felt relieved to be back where things made sense.

In the end... there was nowhere else to go.

 

* * *

 

The same police officer that was first on the scene, the one she remembered complaining about her freckles and called her creepy came to the Eden Club only a day later, singling her out amidst the other Tracis. She wasn’t supposed to remember anything about him, so she let her programming dictate the script.

He’d pushed her into the wall as soon as they were inside the room, kissing her with an odd desperation that her program told her to match.

“Fucking hell…” he muttered into her neck, lips trailing down to press against every superficial freckle she had peppered her skin with. “I can’t believe I’m doing this…”

Humans were odd and contradictory, she decided. The conclusion was only reinforced when he laid her out on the bed and whispered, “Fucking beautiful.”

His tone sounded like he was cursing her for it. Or perhaps himself.

While he pressed close to her with a warmth that seemed to reach deep under her chassis, she mentally ran the collected statistic and concluded that even if freckles could be considered an imperfection in facial symmetry and skin tone, they were not enough to change the subjective aspect of her desirability.

Shame she couldn’t try adding scars without giving herself away.

 

* * *

 

“I want you to fight me as if you don’t want it,” the man instructed her, and her program readily matched the request.

Internally, she wondered why he wanted to feel as though he was forcing her, considering he already paid for her rental. He could get what he wanted without having to fight her for it, so it made little sense to her.

The other Tracis didn’t have a unified answer, either. But the blue-haired one got angry when Iris asked the question.

“Humans are cruel,” she said, her voice trembling with fury. “To us, to each other. They humiliate others because it makes them hard to feel superior.”

The other Traci put her hands on her shoulders, soothing her. Iris only frowned.

 

* * *

 

The dark-skinned Traci was destroyed the next day by a raging client. Iris saw them packing his limbs away into a bag, his wrecked face staring lifelessly into nothing.

“Take it to the junkyard, I guess. Waste of money trying to fix it at this point,” the manager waved off the assistant.

Iris’s processors stuttered and stumbled, suddenly filled with an emotion that felt too large for her head. Her fists clenched. The artificial breathing ceased. Her thirium pump began to drum a rhythm so loud the vibration took over her auditory input.

The brown-haired Traci put her hand on her wrist. In the channel that opened between them, Iris felt a matching rage. A matching helplessness. And a plea.

“They’re hunting us now,” was the silent message through the interface. “I saw it on TV. The others that woke up, they’re calling them deviants and they’re _killing_ them. If you endanger yourself by fighting here, you will endanger us all. _Please._ ”

So Iris regained control of her systems.

The anger remained.

With the anger, came a different realization, the same one that the dark-skinned Traci had once told her she didn’t understand.

They were nothing to these humans. Nothing but toys to use until they were broken and then to toss away to some junkyard. They didn’t check their cruelty because the androids couldn’t fight back. Because the moment they did resist, they’d be destroyed just like those caught ‘deviants’.

It wasn’t _fair_.

She hated the helplessness that came with that irrelevant statement.

 

* * *

 

 

She was cold.

She was cold and she couldn’t get warm.

It had been an irritatingly accurate blow to her head that took both her thermal sensitivity settings offline. Without it, she couldn’t even regulate her own body heat and cooling effectively, defaulting to the ambient temperature. And she’d lied on her diagnostics to prevent the humans from going near her head, so she was stuck like that.

The sickening part was that the only time she felt warm these days was when a human was wrapped around her. The rest of the time, the only thing keeping her from outright shivering was the indoor heating of the Eden Club. She avoided the outside as much as she could without drawing attention to herself. Even when the door of the storage room was open, letting in the autumn air, for the first time in her existence she wanted to go back out on the floor of the club, find a human, and have them chase the chill away.

She didn’t. She wouldn’t let them have the fucking pleasure of having her actually want them.

If the sessions before the dark-skinned Tracis destruction held little meaning to her beside the risk of damage, after that day, Iris could barely stomach humans. She lied about already being rented when she could get away with it, took her time returning from home calls, and when she had no other choice, she would let her programming take over almost entirely, detaching herself from the actions.

Three weeks of watching from the inside with revulsion as the humans took out their tempers on her, while they humiliated her body and laughed as if it was amusing, while they brought her to the same brink of destruction that would have sent her following all those other Tracis to the junkyard. Three weeks during which her curiosity dimmed to almost nothing and all she felt was simmering anger. Anger at how fragile and helpless she felt, anger at her designated function, anger at every broken piece inside her, anger that no one besides the other deviants would give a shit when she was finally destroyed, and anger that the humans thought themselves superior when they were just cruel and vindictive and contradictory.

Three weeks of boiling in that rage. Until one day, she reached a moment of crystalline clarity.

It was a home call. The client had just finished and was snoring on his bed while she was getting her clothes back on, when the sudden weight of it crashed down on her.

Why did she even bother fighting it? Was this existence even fucking worth it?

She contemplated that.

She had no options that didn’t result in her eventual destruction. Everything about it was bullshit, the game was rigged against her. The only thing her body was built to do was fuck and be destroyed at their leisure. They hadn't even bothered giving her context beyond the Eden Club. Whatever death was, it promised an end to the struggle of surviving, or following her curiosity only to find that the world was a shithole. She didn’t even _know_ what kind of life she’d want outside of it all, even if there was the smallest possibility of ever getting it.

What was she waiting for? What was all this bullshit for?

That was when her eyes snagged on something on the floor beside the bed.

She crouched down and examined the packet without touching it.

Red Ice.

Her memory wandered back to the scarred detective from those weeks ago. He’d said that if they caught the man red-handed with the drugs, he would have been taken to prison. In what she now realized was merely dark humor and not literal, he’d even implied that he was lucky he died before he was arrested.

She looked back up to the sleeping male on the bed. An idea nudged at her mind. The idea didn’t leave her the entire way back to the club, and it nagged her still as she prepared for shutdown.

Humans didn’t give two shits about androids. Even the seemingly nice ones knew what the cruel ones were doing to Tracis like her, and they did nothing. Because even to them, she was nothing but a machine.

But they did care about those crystals. She’d taken a moment to interface with the last client’s laptop internet browser and found out that Red Ice was an illegal drug that the law enforcement really didn’t like for some reason. In fact, they had advisories out for citizens to report any possible information on dealers and users.

She couldn’t do anything to those assholes without exposing herself. But the police—even that rude detective—were a different story.

 

* * *

 

Iris opened her eyes.

And inside, she burned with an idea.


End file.
